It is virtually impossible to implement an effective marketing program if you are an author, self-published with very limited financing available, or backed by a small press, with very limited access to cash for marketing. My experience as a writer and marketer has placed me in a unique position of seeing what is required to execute an effective marketing program to promote and take a good work to the buying public, but not having the financial wherewithal to implement in a substantive way.
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One way is for a literary not-for-profit, social enterprise
entity convincing foundations, for example Skoll, Ford, Carnegie-Mellon, Dell,
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Rockefeller, Gates, Buffett, to make
funding available for qualified applicants to tap into for financial assistance
to market their works.
Let’s break this out by suggesting this formula. Together,
the foundations provide initially $15,000,000, deduct $2,000,000 for
administration and management by the not-for-profit, leaving $13,000,000 to be
used by 600 authors annually, to market their books. The recipients receiving
marketing financing will also contribute to the sustainability of the fund, by
paying back a percentage of their earnings, let’s say two percent of book
sales, from what they will gain from this input.
From my experience, I observe that the author is placed at
an enormous disadvantage when called on to put forward money for marketing and
promotions, and be placed in great debt with no guarantees that the
“investment” in securing reviews, interviews, discussion within the bloggers
community will bear fruits to off-set the expended resources that would have
brought the project from thought to book.
There is yet another approach to enable the author that his
or her book will receive a reasonable high degree of effective, professional
marketing and promotion; this is for the not-for-profit administrative entity
to directly be engaging in the marketing of the books.
The author at a reasonable fee of let’s say $500 engage the
marketers, who would be tapping into the said foundations to obtain funding, to
plan and execute the marketing program. And at the end of the engagement the
marketing entity be entitled to a percentage of let’s say four percent of book
sales, resulting from the execution of effective marketing.
As I see what the literary industry is like now in America,
authors are put into a prejudiced position, wherein the success of a bookc is
not based on the merits of its content, or of engaging its readers, instead is
favored to the authors supported by the establishment publishers with very deep
pockets, and years of being connected to the media and public relations
communities, or the author who is financially able to secure the required money
to implement effective marketing programs.
More people are writing I am told, and this appears to me to
be so, and they must be given fair and unbiased opportunities to reach the
buying global markets, and so improve not only the literary outflow, but the
socio-economic conditions of those not coming from the well-to-do, or with
connections to the literary elite. What does it require to get a book reviewed
in the New York Times? Who you know, who knows you, how much you can afford?
Julian Jingles has had a professional career
spanning 52 years writing for publications such as the Jamaica Gleaner, the New
York Amsterdam News, JET magazine, the New York Daily News, and the New York
Carib News. He began work on his novel A Reason For Living in 1966, a teenager
just graduating from high school in Jamaica. In 1967 he went to work as a
journalist at the Gleaner Company, the oldest published newspaper in Jamaica,
and the Caribbean. He has written, produced, and co-directed three documentary
films, production managed several music videos featuring Kool and the Gang,
Steel Pulse, the Main Ingredient, promoted several music concerts, and a stage
play, along with investing in several entrepreneurial projects in America, and
Jamaica.
